


soft meadows

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: 1980s, High School, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-18 19:06:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20196583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Raylan goes to his mama, asking about flowers. Asking how to give his heart away.





	soft meadows

**Author's Note:**

> I really like pairing Frances Givens with wildflowers, it seems. Title from Claire Wahmanholm's poem, "State of Emergency."

The flowers bloom every spring, up in the mountains. Frances knows them all by sight, by smell. She tries to teach them to her son when they visit the hills, mountain laurel and creeping trumpet, evening primrose and butter-and-eggs, a palette swirling with too many colors to name. Raylan’s never had much patience for flowers, though. Not until Valentine’s Day his junior year, her boy seventeen and striking, out with a different girl every week and prettier than them all.

He shuffles into her kitchen, lingers by the doorframe like she might shoo him away. “Mama,” he stutters, ducks his head and stares hard at the linoleum floor. “What – what flowers do you give to someone you lo – like?”

This is it. Seventeen years gone by and now her boy’s fallen in love and tumbled all the brains right out of his head, foolish and young and old enough to be married by next spring.

“Ain’t nothing blooming in February,” she tells him brusquely, and watches her son slump forward, the wind knocked out of his sails. “You come back and ask me in the spring.” He’ll have forgotten by then, Frances is certain. Raylan trades girls quicker than baseball cards, isn’t likely to recall a February sweetheart come May.

But she’s wrong.

Three months later and the day before junior prom and Raylan sidles up beside her as she’s cooking dinner, earns himself a puff of flour to the face for jostling her arm. “You said,” Raylan tells her, glances at her out of the corner of his eye, persistent as he was at seven years old, begging for a baseball bat; determined like he ain’t been in years. “You said to come back and ask you in the spring.”

Frances sighs and rolls out the biscuit dough. “We’ll go flower picking tomorrow,” she promises, handing Raylan a knife and a carrot to chop, young love no reason for idle hands. “Before school. You’d best be up at dawn and ready to leave.”

He is. It shouldn’t surprise her, that her languid, lazy morning son is up before the birds, so eager to pick his girl a bouquet that he chances knocking on their bedroom door.

She wakes before Arlo, thankfully, and lets Raylan drive them up into the hills of her childhood, helps him choose the irises and hyacinth and orchises that he’ll use to woo this girl who’s captured her son’s untried heart. Frances wonders if the flowers will reappear tonight, pinned to the girl’s corsage, can’t imagine any woman turning her boy and his flowers aside.

Frances is tempted to follow him to school, to see this beauty that’s entranced her son, but it’s his business, ain’t it, and so they sit quiet in the truck until he drops her at home, heads on to school alone with his bouquet.

Raylan comes home without the flowers, comes home smiling bright and buzzing like a bee on a honeycomb. “She like ‘em?” Frances asks, though she means to mind her tongue, quiet her wondering on who this girl is and what about her caught Raylan’s roving eye.

Raylan pauses. He runs a hand through his too-long hair, his smile flickering like a candle in a draft. “She did,” he says, and bends down to kiss Frances on the cheek, like he only does on Christmas and her birthday. “Thank you, Mama.” Then he hurries up the stairs to get dressed for the dance.

A car rumbles up their driveway about seven, and Frances knows who it is as soon as the engine shuts off, because Clary’s boy never can help announcing himself to a room, to the whole of creation and their front yard. “Raylan, you’d best be ready!” Boyd Crowder hollers from the walk. “I’ve borrowed Aunt Betty’s car, and you know Elsie and Joanna Lee won’t want to be late. Evening, ma’am,” he finishes, swinging through the screen door without knocking and bobbing his head politely at Frances before heading for the stairs.

There’s no need, though. Raylan comes clattering down in his dress shoes just as Boyd starts up, and they meet on the bottom step, two boys half grown into their slicked down hair and rented suits.

“I’m ready, you asshole,” her son declares, still smiling, though it’s hours since he came home, longer since he plucked up his flowers and gave his heart away. “Let’s go get the girls.”

Boyd lingers on the step for a moment, his hands curling into the wide sleeves of his suit jacket, then turns to follow Raylan. And her son is halfway out the door, seventeen and eager to see his girl, to spend an evening with his love, he’s seventeen and nearly gone and Boyd right behind him when Frances notices the flower pinned to Boyd Crowder’s lapel.

“Wait,” she cries, and the boys stop, and Frances’s hands ache with the desire to catch Boyd Crowder by the shoulders and ask him where he came upon that nosegay, she wants to turn to her son and ask him which kind of beauty it was that entranced his wandering eyes.

But that’s Raylan’s business, ain’t it, and so Frances twists her fingers and says, “Let me get the camera. You boys only get one junior prom.”

Raylan groans and complains about being late, but they’re good boys about it, don’t make too many faces and stand where they’re told. Frances takes a picture of them standing side by side at the foot of the stairs, a press of her finger and a flash that captures the breadth of her son’s bright smile and the beauty of the hyacinth tucked close to Boyd Crowder’s heart.


End file.
